Chrono Trigger

Believe it or not, Square has actually produced a few games that don’t fall underneath the Final Fantasy banner. You’d be forgiven for not realising as much, since many of them are one-offs that sink into relative obscurity fairly quickly, and there are certainly fewer fansites dedicated to them across the Web than to their principal cash cow.

Chrono Trigger is incontestably the best known of these games, and with good reason. It builds on the basic Final Fantasy mostly-turn-based battle formula by giving you the ability to combine attacks between your teammates, which makes for interesting party selection, and shows most enemies on screen before battling them, allowing you to skip fights entirely in many cases — no more tedious, unbidden random battles here. Wandering the world has a new twist, too — while it’s technically a spoiler if you’ve played for less than three minutes, you probably guessed from the name that there’s time travel involved here, your command over which only increases as the game continues.

Like its contemporaries Final Fantasy VI and Seiken Densetsu 3, Chrono Trigger takes another stab at the non-linearity Square often seems to eschew, this time by providing a multitude of optional quests to take on late in the game. I should point out, though, that technically, rather a lot of the game is "optional", in the sense that you can choose to fight the final boss before you’ve even discovered all the different eras you can travel to. Taking on this challenge at various points in the game will yield a number of alternative endings to amuse and entertain you, but unless you’re a masochist or an extreme power-leveller, most of these are likely to be out of your reach with the abilities of your party early in the game. Luckily for you, Square thought to include a “New Game Plus” feature that allows you to start a new game with (almost) all your accumulated treasure and power from a previously completed game.

Coupled with a typically entertaining plot from Square (if not more so than usual) this turns out to be a tremendous amount of fun. We should also mention that this is also one of Square’s shorter games, but combined with the multiple endings and New Game Plus as mentioned above, this does lead to an increase in replayability. You might also recognise some elements that may have inspired later Final Fantasies — we’re down to three characters in the party, and of course, we’re all familiar with the concept of spiky-haired heroes and white-maned pseudo-villains.

CoN has a bit of a history with this game, too. After playing it in 2001, I was surprised to find few websites dedicated to the game, and set out to produce my own. That never went anywhere, but parts of it are finally recycled in this CoN guide. Hey, maybe we’ll show you the original site’s psychedelic background some day. Or maybe we won’t. In any case, while there are now a multitude of guides for Chrono Trigger throughout the Web, we hope this guide will provide anything you need for your expedition through time, whether it’s on the newfangled DS version, the typically slow-loading PSX version, or a good old SNES cartridge.

If you enjoyed Chrono Trigger, you may want to look for its sequel, Chrono Cross. This was only released on the PlayStation and is probably fairly difficult to find now, and we should warn you that it certainly wasn’t to the taste of everyone who played the original.